Brett Maciech
bmaciech@uwyo.edu
Your favorite band shirt goes through a long process of design and production to get from the drawing room floor to the skin on your back. But if there’s even the slightest mistake, that’s enough grounds for the artist, production company or the band itself to scrap hundreds of shirts and either shred or burn them.
Seeing this kind of wasteful behavior, was enough for reuse pro, Alex Eaves, to join the reuse movement and let the spark of conservation within him catch fire.
Eaves’ documentary “Reuse! Because you can’t Recycle the Planet” recently came to the Barry Biodiversity Center and it follows him as he travels the forty-eight continental United States.
“I set out to showcase why reusing is not only more beneficial than recycling for our planet, but how it also benefits people and wallet as well,” Eaves said. “So I travelled to all 48 contiguous states and filmed people who are reusing in different ways in each state.”
Growing up with a mechanically inclined father, Eaves learned from a young age about the benefits of reusing the materials around you instead of throwing it all away.
“My dad was really passionate about saving money,” Eaves said. “He would buy the broken matchbox cars or used car parts and so we would play ‘junkyard’ with my matchbox cars and we would use paper towel rolls as the tunnels and stuff like that.”
Eaves said once he got older, he saw the money aspect of reusing since he was a skateboarder and would go to a skate park where there were only a certain amount of things that can used as obstacles.
“We used to bring refrigerators and desks and benches and all these random things and turn them into obstacles,” Eaves said.
Living in Massachusetts meant that Eaves and his friends had to get creative to skateboard indoors due to weather limiting how much they could outside six months out of the year.
As he grew older, Eaves saw the mass amounts of production and destruction while working in the music industry. He worked for a band that accidentally had their logo printed on the wrong side.
“Looked fine, but the artist didn’t want them and I understood. So I called the merchandise company and I said, ‘we don’t want to sell these, can we send them back and get the correct ones?’ They’re like ‘yeah, no problem, just send them back.’ And I said, ‘Just curious, what happens to those?’ Because I didn’t know I just thought that they could maybe wipe off the ink somehow,” Eaves said.
Eaves said the merchandise company’s response was, “Oh we’ll just shred them into rags, no problem.”
“And I was like ‘that’s crazy!’” Eaves said. “These are a 144 brand new American Apparel shirts, which are really expensive blank, plus all the printing, all the shipping, and I just couldn’t be a part of this.”
Eaves ended up buying all the shirts himself and reusing them for shirts in his burgeoning involvement in the Reuse movement.
Eaves ended up making a smaller video for the reuse brand he was in charge of and a person helping him with the video suggested that he make a film or series on the different methods of reuse people use.
Using Kickstarter in April of 2013, and getting fully funded a month later, Eaves set out to create a film that highlighted the positive aspects of reuse across the country. He started out doing on-the-fly research, driving into a city and finding someone he could use for the film.
“But that doesn’t necessarily work well when you have a videographer that doesn’t like that and you have limited time,” Eaves said. “When we went to Phoenix, it was one of the places I didn’t have something lined up, and we literally had six hours before we had other things we had to get to; to find something, contact them, see if we can film them, film them and go from there. But it ended up happening, we just sat in a coffee shop and powered out some research and found a guy who makes bowties from vintage neckties.”
Over the course of two years, Eaves filmed all sorts of reuse solutions from the bowtie maker, to medical equipment people can produce using this method to creating art out of trash.
Meghan Cranford, the president of the sustainability club, said she was happy to have Eaves visit the university and show his film.
“Tonight we’re actually launching a campaign called ‘Choose to Reuse’ to promote not using disposable coffee mugs and to reuse water bottles on campus,” Cranford said. “So this was a perfect segue into what we wanted to do.”
After he completes touring his film, Eaves said he has big plans to continue the reuse campaign into some familiar and new territory.
“Come the New Year, I want to do a full-fledged tour where I do all 48 states again, all 48 that I went to, and maybe even the other two,” Eaves said. “And spend a couple more days in each place because it’s tough going into a city one day and bailing. My long term goals are to bring reuse into areas where it’s just not thought about.”
Eaves’ company Stay Vocal remains active throughout his touring process as he spreads the saving message of reuse across the country and into the future.
